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Remembering the LAN (2020)

I started programming in the 1990s living above my parent’s medical practice. We had 15 PCs for the business, and one for me. The standard OS was MS-DOS.The network started off using IPX over coax to a Novell Netware server, the fanciest software we ever owned. IPX was so much easier than TCP/IP. No DHCP and address allocation, it just worked. Eventually the PCs would run Windows, and a Windows NT server took over file sharing over TCP/IP. The business software survived this transition unchanged, though there was more operational overhead. We assigned IPs manually.

My father, a general practitioner, used this infrastructure of cheap 286s, 386s, and 486s (with three expensive laser printers) to write the medical record software for the business. Today a professional could surely pick up the skills to build a CRUD app, but they would be hard pressed to tune their software so relentlessly to minimize the keystrokes a receptionist needs to use to check-in a patient, or support a magnetic card reader, or teach laser printers to precisely print onto specialized prescription paper (the printers spoke postscript, but the MS-DOS programming language had an easier instruction layer over PS that made this possible). The result in the 90s was the business needed fewer staff than everyone thought a medical practice of that size required, doctor’s time was used more efficiently than any other software allowed, so productivity increased.

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